


Vices & Vices

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco
Genre: Angst, Band Break Up, Bandom - Freeform, Bottom Pete Wentz, Break Up, Brendon's not doing great either, Canon Compliant, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Hiatus, M/M, Past Patrick Stump/Pete Wentz - Freeform, Past Ryan Ross/Brendon Urie, Pete is not okay, Rock Bottom - Freeform, Romance that hurts, Self-Destruction, Songwriting, Spencer's drug problem, Substance Abuse, Tales from 2010, Vices & Virtues (Album)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-17
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 17:05:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14958609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: 2010 isn't a good year for Brendon Urie. It's not a good year for Pete Wentz either. At least they aren't at rock bottom alone...OR: How Pete and Brendon write Vices & Virtues and save each other, kind of.





	Vices & Vices

**Author's Note:**

> This fic would not exist without my dear friend sunshinexriptide, and as ever, the invaluable immoral-crow was here to support an emotionally satisfying (painful) ending. I had a wonderful time writing from Brendon's POV for the first time, and I hope you all enjoy it too!
> 
>  
> 
> [And don't forget the super-extra-painful companion playlist. I listened to it on loop while I wrote this baby.](https://open.spotify.com/user/marvelgirl238/playlist/7wWiwkwzaZVetZFo248Zt1)

 

 

__

 

_My one regret is you. My one regret is you. My one regret is you._

 

Pete at his worst. Brendon doesn’t realize he’s never seen it before, until the day he does.

At first, it’s the hiatus, the lowest low: a kind of manic energy that feels burnt-up even as it happens, a burnt sugar smell of being used up too fast, bitter in moments that are meant to be sweet. This is a Pete of shatterglass, a parking lot handful of silver-grey crystals that glitter like mirrors but are, nonetheless, the sharp-pebble aftermath of a broken thing. A thing once smooth and clear that was built to break, prelaid with fractures so that it might break clean.

For a while, Pete seems like he’s breaking clean. They party together, a little harder than before, but then, the hiatus follows two years of nonstop touring and writing and media coverage like the London Blitz. Of course Pete needs to blow off some steam. He starts DJing, with his short-shorn hair and his drunk-in-public, and Pete and Brendon usher in a lot of sunrises together, stumbling blurry-blinking out of clubs into the full daylight heat of Los Angeles midmorning, til it feels more like leaving a movie theater than their real lives, til Brendon loses track of which side of the cool-and-dark he belongs on.

Here’s the thing: Brendon is breaking too. Ryan and Jon just _leave_. Spencer negotiates the whole thing. Brendon is barely involved, except that he’s the entire situation. Pete and Brendon lose their bands at the same time. They lose their best friends. They lose more than that, lose things they do not name, even to each other, as if naming the moves out loud after all the silence will only make the shatter sharper.

Then Ashlee moves out.

If Pete was a roman candle before, now he’s a molotov cocktail.

The word is _separation_ , just like the word is _hiatus_ , but both smack of _forever_. Something happens to Pete, something high-powered and bright that leaves behind the smell of desperation. Pete moves too fast to decay. Pete dances on coals as if to outpace death.

Brendon learns to come over on the nights Ashlee picks up Bronx, because Pete is incredible as a dad, and Pete is incredibly terrifying without a purpose. Brendon gets the sense that Bronx is Pete’s only remaining purpose. Brendon learns to bring food, because Pete doesn’t eat when he’s alone. Pete doesn’t shower either, doesn’t shave. Takes pills in clear excess of the recommended dose. Drinks too much.

Well, Brendon’s thirsty too.

They drink together.

*

“Weekend at Bernie’s,” Pete jokes slurring, one night when he’s too fucked up for them to even make it to the club and Brendon’s helping him clumsily into bed. “Weekend at Pete Rose’s.” It’s truer than Brendon is comfortable with: Pete, wearing the face of his friend, a dead body for him to drag around, laughing and smiling like everything’s exactly the same. Like with big enough sunglasses, any size emptiness can be hidden, covered up with mirrors.

*

_At first, Brendon is so convinced the email was fake, he doesn’t even think to tell anyone else about it. Or: he thinks of it, but doesn’t want Ryan to think he’s stupid. They haven’t been hanging out for long, but he likes Ryan so much, thinks he’s so funny, so smart, so cool—_

_How hard can it be, to pretend to be cool? To convince the guys who agreed to be in a band with him that a Mormon-raised kid can be cavalier, clever, dangerous, fun. Brendon is loud, Brendon is a handful, Brendon is too quick for anyone to keep up with. He is the raw materials for glitter and gold. He just has to spin fast enough, dazzle everyone, and not be a gullible dork where the others can see him._

_So the first email, he deletes with barely a glance. Just a prank from a kid at school, or a very specific Nigerian prince scam, or possible hazing by the other guys in the band. Only a chump would fall for it._

_The second email reads,_

It’s Pete Wentz again, from Decaydance. when’s your next show? I want to be at it.

(this is for real. Call me.)

_The third:_

I’m flying to Vegas on Thursday. let me come to your practice, even if it’s in ur mom’s garage. we’ll talk, I’ll hear your stuff live, we’ll see what happens from there. you sound so much like Patrick did when I met him, youre gonna be pure gold. Let me discover you.

-pw

_And the fourth:_

im in vegas, dude. Not for long. call me before i fly out so I can hear you play. The stuff on your website = platinum album, with my help. I want Panic! at the Disco to be the first band i sign.

-pw

p.s. seriously, call me.

_So Brendon finally tells his band, “I’ve been getting these weird emails from someone who says they’re Pete Wentz, and I invited him to our practice tonight,” and Ryan says, “Shit, you’ve been getting those too? I thought they were fake,” and they have all of two hours to prepare a set for the label-scouting prince of Chicago hardcore._

_Actual Pete Wentz shows up—to Spencer’s mom’s garage—and loves what they play. His excitement fills the stuffy garage and they play better than ever, fueled by it. They’ve never even played a show before; he’s their first live audience; he signs them on the spot. When he leaves, the four of them—Brent, Spencer, Brendon, Ryan—shake with adrenaline and disbelief. Ryan throws his arms around Brendon’s neck and hangs on, whispering “oh my god oh my god oh my god, Pete Wentz likes my songs” so it vibrates across Brendon’s skin. Brendon grins so wide you can see each tooth. Running on adrenaline, instinct, unreality, daydream, Brendon leans back in Ryan’s arms and kisses his friend on the mouth. He doesn’t realize til he does it how much he’s wanted to._

_Brent and Spencer, the garage, the rest of the house or town or planet, they might as well not exist. It’s just Brendon and Ryan and the detonation-deaf silence, ringing and awed, that follows any explosion._

_The thing that’s happening with their mouths, it definitely ranks as an explosion._

_Brendon kisses Ryan because he’s happy, because he’s delirious, because he’s young and he wants to. He kisses Ryan because obviously, today anything is possible and all dreams can come true, even the ones you haven’t admitted to yourself yet. And just like magic, Ryan kisses back. It’s better than any enchantment. Truer than true love, longer than ever after. Not once upon a time: today._

*

Brendon can’t even listen to the rough demos they’d put together, the last time they were Panic! at the Disco. He’s got a stack of songs he wrote with Ryan, or about Ryan, or while laying in bed next to Ryan. All of them are radioactive now. He’s nauseous from the proximity. He’s at a Best Buy, sees 2.5 seconds of a Pretty. Odd. video on the display TVs, and wants to punch his own face til the plasma cracks and smears, colors dripping distorted, meaningless bright pixel gel. He can’t stand himself, how happy he looks, how Beatles-stupid and in love.

They were writing an album, when Ryan left and took Jon with him. _Creative differences_. Brendon’s realizing he can’t pick up the pieces of that work. It’s just cracked-up edges, spaces Ryan’s meant to fit. He needs to write something entirely new.

But it’s like he’s gone detonation-deaf. In the aftermath of a sonic bomb, all he can hear is the ringing in his own ears. There’s no music left.

*

Bringing Spencer around Pete is a mistake these days, it only takes a few bad nights to learn that. ( _Bad_ by Brendon’s new standards, not his old ones. Shit that would have topped the chart for bad nights this time last year is just a Tuesday for him now. So when he says bad, he means toilet-bowl bad. He means the detox shakes. He means broken glass and blood on the tile and twisting Pete’s neck so it hangs over the edge of the bathtub and there’s no way he can drown in his own bile. He means weaving in and out of sleep with his hand on Spencer’s chest to make sure it’s still rising and falling. He means being the only one together enough to try and decide if he should call an ambulance, and then not even knowing which of his friends to describe to the operator, and hanging up before he gets any help because he can’t tell what the emergency is, he just knows he’s having one. _Bad_ means some kinds of sadness are contagious, and if he lets Pete and Spencer cross-contaminate, he’s basically the bookie taking bets over who makes it through any given night alive.)

*

How many people is Brendon expected to keep alive at once?

*

It’s from the belly of this lowest point that Pete remembers he’s Brendon’s producer. That he remembers if Brendon can’t write, that’s on _both_ of them. The first time he’s left the house unprompted in weeks, it’s to show up at Brendon’s door with a pocketful of anxiety medication and a notebook choked with lyrics he’s now never gonna use.

It’s been so long since he’s seen Pete before dusk, Brendon’s surprised all over again how rough he looks. In daylight, his face is hollow and sharp, his eyes set too far back, shadowed deep under his brow. His skin looks yellow-grey and loose, days of scrubby stubble filling in his sunken cheeks in an unsettling way, evoking gravedirt and gravel. Brendon opens the door and coyote-Pete smiles by unconvincing reflex, a kind of jack-o-lantern leer. His eyes are red-rimmed, his sclera jaundiced around irises of flat dull amber.

“Jesus,” Brendon mutters involuntarily. “What are you doing here? It’s 10am.” He grabs a pair of sunglasses off the table by his front door and hands them to Pete, thinking he’d rather see himself reflected back raw and metallic than meet those eyes. He doesn’t realize his mistake til Pete puts the glasses on: Brendon doesn’t want to make eye contact with Brendon Urie, either.

Pete is bouncing on the balls of his feet, vibrating with an energy that feels like barbed wire. “Replacing sleep with caffeine, replacing caffeine with you,” he says. “Couldn’t sleep. I’ve got all these lyrics to never use and you owe my label a record you can’t write, and I thought maybe…”

Brendon, in a dirty t-shirt and Hawaiian print boxers, can see his pillow-creased unshaven face and tangled hair far too clearly in Pete’s sunglasses. “Starbucks drivethrough,” he decides. “Then the studio.”

When they get there, he’s surprised. An anchor and a black hole should make each other heavier, but writing is not like drowning. Somehow, bank robbers in black masks, they hold each other up.

*

Brendon sits at the computer and Pete flops on the couch, and they trade serrated lyrics about heartbreak, and they’re careful not to mention how neither of them is the boy the other longs for.

Pete writes, _I’m skin and bone, just a king and a rusty throne, the castle’s under siege, the sign outside says leave me alone._

Brendon writes, _It was always you falling for me, now there’s always time calling for me. I’m the light blinking at the end of the road, blink back to let me know._

Pete writes, _The world may call it a second chance, but when i come back to you it’s gonna be more like a relapse._

Brendon writes, _Only my heart knows my head is lying_.

Each of them has another ex on the calendar, but being here together is so much better than being alone.

*

_Pete Wentz comes to see them record, which is the least and most surreal part of the whole whirlwind. They have still never played a show. This is a semi-famous rock star, an emo of some renown, a person who has been reviewed in Rolling Stone, featured in AP, and blurbed in NME. This is a person who heard the words Ryan wrote and the music Brendon made to match on their Myspace and flew to Las Vegas with a record deal. They graduated high school less than a month ago. It feels like the part of the movie right after you make a pact with the devil, when everything is champagne fountains and bright lights, fame and success, and you haven’t figured out yet that it’s all too good to be true. The crystal chandelier is gonna crush them at any moment, but for now, gold floors and gold shoes, they’re gonna dance._

_Except that the recording studio feels more like somebody’s basement than glamour and glory, and it’s in fucking Maryland and it’s been pouring down rain all week, and they’re living on PBJs and all sharing one motel room because no one has any money._

_Pete shows up wearing that smirk-smile, all vampire teeth and swoopy bangs and tight clothing. He brings Patrick Stump, the singer of his band, the one Brendon has been studying the vocals of ever since Pete said they sounded alike. They orbit one another tightly, tethered by small significant smiles and frequent touches. Their energy is one of closeness, excitement._

_“Pattycakes is the most talented musician I know,” Pete tells them. “And I’ve been playing with Andy Hurley since I was a teenager, so. You know that’s saying something.”_

_Patrick swats his praise away, making a face that’s both a smile and a frown. “Pete’s really excited he signed you guys. He has this intuitive feel for music, for the way culture shifts—he’s very zeitgeisty. Basically, I’m here because he thinks he’s very clever and he wanted to show you guys off.”_

_Pete laughs, his happiness so sincere it shows every tooth. His eyelids crinkle up with fondness and he throws an arm over Patrick’s shoulder, squeezes Patrick into his side. Patrick yields, folding into the embrace, gazing up at Pete with a look Brendon recognizes. It’s the way Brendon looks at Ryan._

_That night, Panic! at the Disco and two members of Fall Out Boy are all crammed into one booth at a pinball-themed bar the bouncer just barely let them into. Brendon is sitting close enough to the inside of Pete’s ear to have an intimate conversation without being overheard. He barely knows Pete at all, but he’s had one PBR and no ADHD medication, and that’s enough for him to say, “It’s really amazing to see you and Patrick together—how happy you are, what good music you write. That touring and living out of vans and motel rooms and shit hasn’t like, changed how you feel about each other, or made relationship problems into band problems. Like—I think you’re kind of my role model. I hope me and Ryan can be like you guys one day.”_

_Pete grins, more often and easily than any other person Brendon knows, but he’s already noticed that the easy glow of it doesn’t always reach Pete’s eyes. Sometimes it doesn’t even try. This is one of those times. “He’s my best friend,” Pete says loudly, overcasually._

_Brendon, who grew up in Las Vegas, is 17 years old, and knows what love looks like, says, “I’m not talking about friendship.”_

_Pete goes still, his grin immobilized. It’s headlight bright, like it was designed to make Brendon freeze too. “Like, how public are you guys?” Brendon blusters on, because he’s excitable, he ignores warning signs, he’s too much, he always has been. “Me and Ry are just—we just started kind of dating, and I think he’s the love of my life, so I don’t want to put any pressure on it or go public too soon. But I’m really excited about him and I don’t want to hide it either, and—”_

_“Me and Patrick aren’t dating,” Pete interrupts. His voice is strange, his teeth locked in something suddenly very different from a smile. Brendon remembers that he doesn’t know Pete that well, really._

_“Ask him out, then,” Brendon suggests confidently. Seventeen years old, has fallen in love exactly once, and is_ very _sure he knows what he’s talking about. “He wants you to. I can tell.”_

_Pete just keeps staring at Brendon til the waitress comes back. “Who ordered the off-menu blueberry milkshake?”  she asks._

_“Uh, I did,” Pete says. He points across the table towards Patrick, and in the low light of the bar, it is possible only Brendon notices his blush. “For him.”_

_It’s a love match, Brendon’s sure of it. He grabs Ryan’s fingers under the table, gives them a squeeze. It’s all happening. The world’s unfolding at their feet, just like he always knew it would._

*

They’re in the pool, comparing dead man’s floats and drunk enough to think this is a good idea. Pete hasn’t gone home yet. It’s been three days. They’re writing together, ordering in food, smoking weed, crunching benzos between their teeth like Flinstones vitamins, falling asleep on leather couches when they’re too drunk to stay awake, and starting over again when they surprise themselves by waking up. They’re so far detached from the cycles of the actual sun that they could market a new circadian rhythm, plastic and faked, an artificial amphetamine sunrise for medicated chlorine-streaked spray-tan lives.

They’re clinging to each other, something between a band and a boyfriend, like filling a heart-shaped void with handful after handful of sticky, shattered champagne glass.

Pete breaks the surface gasping, water streaming down his face. Brendon cackles with delight: 63 seconds. It’s the longest either of them has lasted dead so far.

“Bet I can beat that,” Brendon says. He hits the water teeth-first, grinning. He holds his breath, closes his eyes, goes limp—pretends to die.

It doesn’t feel so different, really.

*

The problem is, writing is vulnerable. Baring of muscle, stripped sinews, silver-tongued teeth. The problem is, neither of them are used to writing with just words. Where minds meet, bodies follow. That’s how it’s always been.

Even the wrong body is a body. What’s the difference, in the light-leached endlessness of this lonesome night?

*

If you think sex will wallpaper over the still-bleeding hole in your steaming heart, make you feel complete again, distract you from the pain that is more than pain and more like permanence, the phantom limb of the man you love, the one who doesn’t want you anymore or ever again…

If you think sex will fix all that, or feel like it does for a minute or two? You are correctly estimating the power of orgasm-imbued oxytocin.

*

Whatever this version of 2am is, that desert between party’s start and liquor’s end, Pete and Brendon are deep in it. They’re on Brendon’s roof, hot clay tiles cool and smooth this many hours removed from daylight, looking out over the smoggy city, cupped in a shaggy valley, cliffs and heavens ragged above. The nightlight neon glow rising off Hollywood apes sunrise, an alien dawn. The wind tonight tastes strange, salt and metal, loss and change.

Brendon usually tries to keep track of them both, a chemist calculating blood toxicity, a beat poet of drug interactions, but he outran himself tonight. His blood sings, slinging through his aching veins, platelets and plasma and poison. Pete’s pockets rattle and clack with emptying orange. They throw beer cans off the roof. They both stink sweaty with the muggy sap of hotboxed weed. His mouth is muzzed, words blurred by smoke, and he’s too wired to sleep but he can’t quite keep his eyes open either. He’s not sure what would happen, if he walked off the edge of the roof; he has the odd, tickling inclination that he could step into the air, float up and up forever, til he’s gone.

Soft and sleepy and silk, the words just slide out of him. “Do you miss him?”

There is no owl-like _who_ , no point anymore in pretending. On this roof there are no ingenues. Brendon is asking about Patrick and Pete is thinking about him.

Pete’s voice sounds as far away as his glassy eyes. “Not like I thought I would,” he says. He begins throwing loose change from his pocket off the roof, aiming for the inground pool. They are both a little too invested in the pause between the launch and the landing, two lost boys leaning out over the edge of something bigger than themselves and contemplating the fall.

“I thought I would die without him,” Pete says. Far below, a tiny splash. A penny, oxide-green, drowns, seeking bottom. “Instead it’s like, the good part of me did. The part that loved him—the thing in me that used to shine under his eyes— _that_ died. And all the rest of me just… keeps on living. Dragging my body around, exhausted, not even knowing why I keep going. Without him I feel… nothing. I don’t even love him anymore, Brenny. The mechanism by which I love has shattered.”

Brendon goes from feeling like he has no stomach or body at all to the fist-clench sourness of nausea in the space of Pete’s words. It’s unpleasantly like being torn lurching back to sickly earth the very moment you think you’ve broken gravity.

“That’s not,” he says, “the problem I have.”

*

Some loves are an immunity.

Sometimes you’re poisonslick sick behind the fucking curtain and they slip behind it with you, groping grimy in the dark, toxic and spreading waste, fouler than any oil spill but easier to get off. Oh, black and horrible, it’s easy to get off.

Some loves are an infection.

*

_2006 and their lives are unrecognizable. 2006 and they’re cutting their teeth on a million copies sold. They’re on their first tour. They’re wearing costumes. Nothing rhymes with circus, and they perform. Brendon has a taste for it, a certain kind of flair: a showman born. A ringmaster. They perform._

_2006 and Brendon kisses Ryan on stage, because that’s what they do offstage, because Ryan is glitter-streaked and grinning and the prettiest thing he’s seen in his life, because Brendon is young and in love and this,_ this _is everything he’s ever wanted. He is 19 years old, the crowd screams like they’re being set on fire every time he does anything, and Ryan is not a secret. The way he feels about Ryan is not a secret. It’s a scrolling marquee feeling, a marriage proposal on the Kiss Cam at the Superbowl feeling, a skywriting feeling. He’s not gonna whisper it in the dark. He’s gonna live it, out loud and all true, for everyone to see. It is the love that dares speak its name—the love that screams it._

_2006 and Ryan kisses him back. 2006 and they slow dance on tour buses. 2006 and they wake up on the couch in the lounge instead of their bunks, curled together, hands pressed. 2006 and they are so, so happy._

_Fast forward to 2008. Ryan doesn’t find it so charming anymore, Brendon’s sloppy kisses onstage. He’s pissed Ry off somehow, again, over the course of tonight’s show; he can’t even keep track of what he’s done anymore. He’s sick of trying. Ryan’s anger at him trips a chain reaction: Ryan gets pissy at something benign, Brendon feels frustrated, Brendon says fuck it, Brendon goes ahead and misbehaves egregiously, because if Ryan’s gonna be mad anyway, if nothing makes the kid happy, Brendon may as well earn it. Brendon may as well do whatever the fuck he wants._

_2008 and they slam off stage at the end of the night, the adoring screams of their fans so much background noise, the choking thick energy of the crowd roiling, climbing up the ladders of his blood, swelling the muscle of his heart like an allergic reaction, feeding Brendon’s ugliness._

_“What’s the problem this time,_ sweetie _,”_ _Brendon snarls. Ryan has just unslung his guitar and Brendon grabs it by the neck, wrenches it away from the boy he loves, and shoves it onto the rack with excessive force. Sweat stings his eyes, salt stings his heart._

 _“The same problem I have every time, which I am getting really fucking sick of talking about like it’s new information!” Ryan’s outlined eyes shine brittle, glass about to crack. His nose is pink, his cheeks burnt red. Angry and adrenaline blind and leaning into the nasty post-show crash, Brendon doesn’t take the time to notice that Ryan is showing signs of actual damage, like he’s one wrong jab away from real tears. “I wish you wouldn’t touch me like that onstage, I_ hate _it when you do that.”_

_Brendon pushes up close into Ryan’s space, cornering him against stage scaffolding. He leers like Las Vegas, the way champagne bubbles and burns in an open wound, an effect like peroxide only leaving behind more filth than it scours away. Ryan shrinks from him, like his kiss is punch drunk poisonous, his touch the most terrible thing Ryan can think of. It makes Brendon feel like a diver in the deepest part of the sea, his heart squeezed and his lungs leavened til he’s crushed like a tin can._

_“What, are you gonna force me?” Ryan sneers. Brendon lunges for his mouth, not knowing the answer and ready to find out. Ryan shoves him away much more roughly than he did onstage. Brendon stumbles, almost falls; Ryan is free, back no longer against the wall. “Don’t make me part of your fucking performance,” he spits, “if you feel any real thing for me at all.”_

_But Brendon doesn’t understand how Ryan can ask him to hide it. How Ryan can ask him, on camera and on stage, to pretend there’s no love between them. To act like he’s ashamed. How can Ryan want him to diminish his love, to douse it in public, if_ Ryan _feels any real thing at all?_

*

“How is it for you?” Pete asks, that night on the roof, unmoored from circadian time, out of change and looking for something else to hurl off the edge. The effect of gravity by observational, experiential learning. The toes of his sneakers inch closer to the edge til they’re hanging off it, til he’s kicking a $750 shoe into the pool. The splash is bigger, sloppy; they share a pleased grin at the raw, useless pleasure of waste. It’s safer, if nothing means anything. Especially them. “How do you miss him?” says Pete.

“I miss Ryan like… waiting for blood to fill your mouth after a punch to the teeth. Blood like spiderweb cracks, seeping into the line of your gums, turning your smile incarnadine, your teeth garnet.”

“Those are lyrics, not feelings,” Pete says, with an astuteness that he never quite loses, no matter how fall-off-the-stage-hosting-a-holiday-show-fucked-up he lets himself get. That sharpness and clarity in how he sees the world: Brendon wonders if he’s running from it. If that’s the thing he’s trying to drown, with bottle after bottle, pill after pill.

“I miss Ryan like him leaving me was always inevitable,” Brendon tries again. He’s a little too fucked up, maybe, to get it into words precise. He’s fucked up enough to say the name _Ryan Ross_ out loud, which he hasn’t done in months, wasn’t planning to do for years. “I miss him like falling out of love with your one and only. I miss him like… what could possibly come next?”

“I don’t believe in one and onlys,” Pete says. That thick, dissociative glaze is coming over his voice: he’s wrecked and he’s tired. Here’s the part where they go back inside and find more alcohol, or pass out up here and wake up to the cruelty of the thirsty sun, or take a shortcut down and find fluorescence, paper gowns, and gurneys on the other side.

“Then you’re the same idiot you always were,” Brendon tells him, “not seeing what was right in front of you for what it was.”

One way or another, two boys on the roof find their way down.

*

It’s Brendon who starts it. Technically. If you’re bothered about the technicalities.

He’s so lonely his skin itches, like it’ll crawl off him and find human contact on its own if it has to. Pete, stupid sexy Pete, sleep-it-off red-eyed Pete. Chlorine-scented, tattooed and bruised Pete. Prince of Los Angeles after midnight Pete. Take off your clothes onstage Pete. Nightclub Pete, DJ Pete, not okay Pete. Brendon’s suddenly closest friend Pete.

Closest like heads and hearts, sure. Closest like hands and hips too. Cocks and lips. Close enough to come. Close enough to touch and be _touched_ , fo a moment, for a night.

There’s not an inebriated inch of him that doesn’t howl with longing.

Brendon knows what he is to Pete, what he has always been. Brendon is a version of Patrick that Pete can be there for, take care of, rescue and support. Brendon is a version of Patrick that Pete can be close to in a way that the real Patrick wouldn’t allow, even when they were lovers. Brendon is a version of Patrick that is broken and dirty and _real_ , a version Pete can touch. A version that was never sacred, a version Pete doesn’t have to worry about making profane.

Brendon knows he can be more to Pete than this. Knows they can be more to each other. Knows they can do more than write songs and stare down the barrel of what they’ve lost. He knows they can fill each other up again.

He’ll be Patrick to Pete, if Pete will be Ryan to him. With eyes closed. With alcohol and fistfuls of pills. With lights off. With lips and teeth and tongue, with whatever pulp is left of their hearts, with the wetslickslidegush of bodies. For a day, for a night, for a fuck, forever. Brendon’s not particular. Brendon doesn’t care what Pete gives him, as long as it’s something.

Because god, Brendon needs something.

They’re writing, Pete sitting back while Brendon picks up steam, putting together a song, the first music he’s really written since his last fight with Ryan, who always wrote the words. Only their hearts know their heads are lying when they tell each other they are over it. (Being blue is better than being over it.) The melody that starts flowing out of him feels so good, his body and not just his brain responds.

Goofy and grinning, he mouths the microphone, squeezes headphones to his ears with one hand, reaches for Pete with the other. Pete allows himself to be caught and pulled, and Brendon hooks his belt loop, holds his hip in place. With the microphone between them and their hips pressed flush, Brendon begins to dance to the nascent song that pipes through the studio. “What do you think?” he asks Pete, who lets the music move him. Hip-to-hip, like it’s normal, they dance. And it is normal, mostly. Except for how it’s not. “It’s got good bones, yeah? I can feel it in yours.”

Pete hasn’t been sober in days, not since the last time he had Bronx with him. His breath is all chemical by this point, not an exhalation so much as the metabolites of all the things he’s taken today, whenever it was that today began. Maybe that means Brendon’s taking advantage. But Brendon’s out of his head, too. He leans around the microphone, cocks his head at Pete in question. Their lips are very close. Pete licks his, slow and unself-conscious. He swallows hard. He is glass and glazed, up close but far away. His lips part around his breath. His lips are thick, damp with shine. Brendon’s question goes unanswered but he’s done with asking. He closes the distance between their mouths, part of him surprised to find Pete’s lips to be solid, and presses his excitement and his loneliness, tremendous both, into a kiss.

Pete kisses back. This feels important. Hips pressed, hearts somewhere, the microphone digging into Brendon’s cheek, Pete kisses back.

*

 _For all that Pete is sexualized pretty much professionally, posing in J14 with his torso bared and his jeans tighter than skin and his combat boots, his eyeliner, his dick on the internet for all to see—his dick the first_ ever _seen, at dial-up speeds, for a whole generation of girls, Pete Wentz starring in Puberty Hit That Night all across the nation—Brendon doesn’t see him in a sexual way. He’s always regarded Pete as attractive, magnetic, sensual—it’s hard not to be aware of who he is, how he is, or his effect on the general world around him—but his crush on Pete has always been vague, formless. Pete is a peacock with sewn-on sequin eyes and feathers framed in neon tubes, a late night, smoke filled room, honey-drizzle kind of can’t resist. Captive and captivating: the kind of person Brendon wants to_ be _more than_ have _. It’s hero-worship, plus or minus situational horniness._

_At this time in his life, Brendon has feelings for Ryan like a disease, chronic and gnawing, debilitating, an ache that consumes. He’s frantic in love, an addict with withdrawal shakes, useless for anything that’s not staring into Ryan’s eyes, mouthing over Ryan’s skin, kissing vows into the bone and marrow and tissue and fat that constitute this man he loves. So of course he doesn’t want anyone else. Of course he doesn’t think of anyone else that way. Of course Pete as a sexual object isn’t even a glimmer of possibility in his tunnel-blind lovesick eye._

_Til the day on tour he runs back to Fall Out Boy’s tour bus for the aux cord he’s forgotten there, lets himself in without knocking, and gets a faceful of Pete’s spread, submissive ass. Brendon’s dick is hard before his brain can even parse what he’s seeing: Pete pressed facedown into the couch, Patrick’s hand white-knuckle gripping the back of his neck, pushing him down. Pete’s mouth is open, soft with bliss, his eyes squeezed shut like it’s painful, how close Patrick is bringing him to utter destruction. Patrick’s other hand has Pete’s ass cheeks spread, two fingers working in and out of him. Pete is making sounds Brendon has never imagined coming from his mouth before, and Patrick’s lips are curled in sneering, unaware determination. Pete’s hips writhe and buck as he presses himself back against Patrick’s fingers. Patrick bends down, adds his mouth to the mess, licks wetly and spits on Pete’s opening, slicking it before he starts working his fingers faster, rolling them, stretching sensation out, giving Pete as much and then more than he can take._

_It is the sexiest fucking thing Brendon has ever seen._

_He stumbles back out of the bus gasping, panicking, banging the door as he closes it. They’ll know they’ve been seen. He don’t think Pete in this state is capable of caring, but Patrick will. All this time, Patrick has been so careful not to let anyone know about this—so careful that not even Pete knows that it’s real. With Pete facedown, eyes closed, Patrick behind him, Pete can’t see the look in Patrick’s eyes. The softness, the love. The trembling addiction, the crawl-inside-you fever, the die-for-you devotion. Brendon knows that look because he wears it around Ryan. Pete doesn’t know that look, because Patrick doesn’t show it to him. You can tell from how Pete acts that he has no idea anyone loves him. Has no idea Patrick loves him. Is happy to be used, even though he’s sick with it, because he’d rather be a disposable fuckable thing to Patrick than nothing to him at all. Because Pete thinks those are the only options._

_It’s not just the sex, the look and smell and feel of Pete being fucked, that changes how Brendon sees him. It’s the vulnerability, the crush of that much love, the willingness to feel the pain of not receiving any back, if it means even a moment close to Patrick._

_It’s how much of himself Brendon sees, reflected back in Pete, at that moment._

_It’s the part of Pete that is so broken-open desperate to be seen, noticed, loved._

_Brendon wants_ that _. To be the one filling that need for once, instead of feeling it._

_To be the one who’s needed._

*

Inside Pete’s kiss, there is a battle. Brendon can feel him fighting himself, imagines it’s the mirror of what Brendon’s feeling too. Because it just feels _so good_ to feel that want again, to have someone pushing against you as much as you’re pushing against them. The mutual pull of it, their twin desperation, makes it so much harder to stop. To want to stop. And maybe Pete isn’t planning on stopping, and maybe Brendon isn’t either. Maybe Pete’s kiss goes brutal with the struggle inside himself, greedy and forceful and rough, yes, _rough_ , his hand coming up to dig into Brendon’s collarbone, to press against Brendon’s airway, to add just an edge of dizzy starry wheeze to his already-strained inhalations. Maybe the way Brendon kisses is nothing like how Patrick does and maybe it’s exactly the same. Maybe Brendon craves the buttery ache of Pete’s rough handling on him, the lack of tenderness and absence of love that shines in that self-destructive violence, and maybe Brendon tries to pull that low meanness out of Pete. Maybe Brendon sucks and nips at the part of Pete that will go along with anything if it hurts enough, trying to drown out the small voice in the back of his own head that longs for a taller, lankier body pressed against his, Pete matching him almost perfectly in height and so much broader and more solid than Ryan ever was. Maybe Brendon is surprised to feel their dicks line up, hard and at the same height, without anyone having to bend or stand on tiptoes to seek that friction. Maybe Brendon is struck by a two-sided feeling, half loss and half relief, at how different this feels, how he likes it and how it’s not the same, how it’s nothing like the boy he loved, how he’s nothing like the boy he was.

Maybe it matters and maybe it doesn’t.

Maybe none of it matters at all.

*

It’s not Brendon who stops it. Brendon’s never stopped anything in his life. That’s kind of his whole deal. It’s not Brendon who stops it but it is: because Pete pulls Brendon’s hip hard against him, grinding their dicks together, tugging Brendon’s shirt up his back, and presses his fingers into the front and back of Brendon’s throat and moves his mouth to Brendon’s neck and kisses, tongue and rough, teeth and suck, like he’ll dig a hole and bury himself there, inside Brendon’s sticky golden voice, and the bloodslick will cover it up, wet as sex and not much stranger. Pete does all this, and Brendon moans, an involuntary and lightly musical scale of sucked-in breath.

Pete freezes. Brendon doesn’t: he keeps going, hands roving, one skimming below the waistband of Pete’s jeans, seeking whatever fire licked at Pete to push him into this kiss in the first place. “Pete,” he blurs against Pete’s jaw, his chin, his cheek, his lips. Brendon kisses anything he can reach, his fingers plunging lower, looking for anything he can hold onto. “Pete, Pete. Be here with me.”

Pete doesn’t stop Brendon from touching him, but he doesn’t touch back. “You sounded—” he says. His voice goes thin and dies out. Brendon digs fingernails into his hipbone and he bucks, halfhearted, a physical response with no intention behind it. “You sounded like Patrick,” says Pete.

“I’m not,” Brendon says fiercely. His eyes are flint and sharper things.

“I know,” Pete says. And he steps back, catches up Brendon’s hands and returns them to him, his face an apology. “I’m sorry, Bren. I don’t feel this way about you.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Brendon insists. His voice comes out so ragged it surprises him. His words hang in the air, untrue.

When Pete doesn’t answer, he presses, “We love each other, don’t we?” He feels stupid and his cock is aching and he can never let anything go, ever, except the one thing that mattered most. “In other ways. So why can’t we do this too?”

He reaches for Pete’s waist again, smoothes the skin against his palm. Pete leans in, eyelids fluttering, and Brendon almost has him. It feels important, getting, having, fucking, stuffing himself full of sensation and thrill til no one could ever call him empty. Only gold is hot enough.

But Pete’s eyes fly open again, focused in a way they weren’t before. “Sex isn’t like that for me,” he says. His voice is steel, a shape it hasn’t been in weeks. He means it.

“Completely failing to live up to your reputation,” Brendon mutters, ungracious in his embarrassment. His unanswered want. He knows Pete wants this. He felt Pete’s dick hard against him. He doesn’t care if it’s Patrick Pete sees behind closed eyes.

“ _You’re_ not,” says Pete.

They regard each other evenly from a drunk, disheveled distance of inches. Pete’s obvious disappointment makes it yawn like a gulf between them.

Well, Brendon thinks. It was pretty fucking stupid of either of them to expect anything better of him.

*

That night, Brendon and Pete sleep together in Brendon’s bed. They curl up close, pressed together and clinging, somewhere between brothers and lovers. Something more than they are but less than Brendon wants them to be. Stretched on satin sheets, Brendon buries his face in Pete’s skin and inhales deeply of his friend’s ozone smell. It is a smell of ill health, of half-lifes, of psychoactive substances and metabolic breakdown.

There is nothing he can do that will make Pete leave him, he realizes. Not trying to fight or trying to fuck or getting so jacked up he splits his own life in half like a pomegranate and gluts himself on the seedy, gushing inside. Not getting so jacked up he ruins Pete’s life too. Pete is a friend like an anchor. Anchored to earth, anchored to each other, sinking without oxygen to the deepest part of the sea: wherever Brendon wants to take them. It’s a comfort, he thinks: it should be a comfort. Unconditional brotherhood and love. But he lays awake, his heart pounding harder than the drugs he’s taken should allow. Pete’s a handgun without a safety, a parachute without a ripcord. Pete won’t hold him back from anything. Pete will follow him down.

Brendon’s never had a friend like that before.

Brendon is usually so easy to leave.

*

 _They wrote_ A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out _in Spencer’s garage and Brendon’s attic bedroom. They wrote_ Pretty. Odd. _in bed, and Brendon loved every idea Ryan had, gave him everything, veered away from himself, stifled his own artistic leanings. He did this happily, eagerly, gratefully, with a brand-new, expansive generosity, like his heart had been fucked open and revealed a whole new magnanimous man under the glossy showman’s shell. He had a soft inner center and he wore it on the outside, like armor. He was loved, and the music flowed through him and Ryan and back again, looping like their love, both of them electrified into conductors. The look in Ryan’s eyes, the raw spark of him, made Brendon want to give him entire planets, this world and all the others._

_This record, they write from contention, from opposite ends of an unnamed war._

_Here is what keeps happening:_

_A minor disagreement about a song fragment turns into an argument about the album as a whole turns into a full-fledged, knock-down, drag-out fight about the future and identity of the band itself. Only, they’re not talking about what they’re talking about. Or they’re not_ only _talking about that. They’re talking about their relationship too. They’re talking about what used to be good, natural, exciting, easy. What is now bitter, contentious, tedious, always-wrong. Lately Brendon feels love like a hangnail: he’d rather tear it apart, make it bleed, and know from the bright flash of pain and crying out that Ryan still loves him._

_Lately, unless they’re screaming at each other, Brendon doesn’t know how he’s supposed to tell whether Ryan loves him. Whether Ryan wants him around at all._

_Their last fight feels like any other. There’s nothing special about it, nothing that seems more final, fatal, finished. “I’m getting lost in your sound again,” Ryan complains, cutting off playing abruptly and stranding Brendon in the middle of a big, showy, improvised vocal trill. “You’re drowning me out, Bren.”_

_“Get louder, then. Push back. Don’t hide behind me.”_

_“I’m not_ hiding _. I just like a quieter, more understated sound here. You’re so—flashy. Like you’re performing for a stadium when it’s just you and me.”_

_Brendon has a particular sensitivity to Ryan telling him their relationship is a performance; most of the time Brendon feels like his love for Ryan is the only real thing about himself. He hears what Ryan says as a personal attack, so he attacks back._

_“Well,_ you _sound like you’re trying to make_ Pretty. Odd. _again, and that record got panned and barely sold any copies. No one liked it, no one bought it. Another record like that will kill the band.”_

 _Ryan barely reacts, which makes Brendon feel like he’s right and his boyfriend not only dislikes him, but doesn’t even care about him. Ryan raises one thin, perfect eyebrow, and Brendon loves his dear face in a way that breeds not tender touches but fucking_ smashing. _Ryan mutters, “Why am I not surprised you’re exaggerating and escalating.”_

 _“Why am_ I _not surprised you think you’re Paul Mc-fucking-Cartney,” Brendon shoots back._

 _“This music, this band, is not just_ you _,” Ryan says. “It’s not your band and it’s not your success. You think you’re the reason_ Fever _made us famous, but you didn’t even fucking write it! I composed_ Fever, _I wrote the lyrics. It was_ my _record and this was my band before you ever—”_

_“Who gives them the show they’re paying for? Who does the interviews? Don’t tell me it’s not my band—”_

_“You aren’t leaving room for me in this music, Brendon! On this record! In our fucking band! You’re not leaving room for me_ anywhere _. Will you just listen to what I want—”_

 _“Will you stop trying to change me into a person I’m not? Will you stop acting like you don’t like who I am, like you’re_ ashamed _of me—”_

 _Ryan stands up abruptly, tossing his guitar angrily onto Brendon’s bed. “The reason I don’t want you to kiss me onstage or in public is not because I’m_ ashamed _of you and you fucking_ know it _.”_

_“Maybe I don’t know it!” Brendon yells back._

_“Then you really aren’t listening to me,” says Ryan._

_“I think you need to be really, really clear with yourself whether you like_ me _or you just like what I do for your career and how I make you feel about yourself. Because I think you’re fucking—you’re the world to me, Ry, and everyone knows it.” Brendon wants to sound strong here, but his voice is breaking. “And I don’t know what the fuck I am to you. Sometimes it seems like you don’t even want to be around me. You call me and I come and then I—then I don’t know why I’m even there.”_

_“We’ve been together almost four years, and you’re asking me to make sure I really like you?”_

_“Act like you want me, if you want me,” Brendon challenges._

_“It’s like no matter what I do,” Ryan says, “it’s the wrong thing.” That’s Brendon’s line; it’s unfair for Ryan to say it. “I do want you, I do like you, and I show you all the time. You just—you’re paying attention to the wrong things.  You focus so hard on being out to the whole world, you focus so hard on this one very overwhelming, very loud thing, you miss everything else. You miss every fucking way I care for and take care of you. Everything I do to try and make you feel loved just—slides off of you. Like it’s below your notice. Like the way I love you and who I am isn’t enough. Not for you, so bright and so shining and so hungry and so loud. Not for Brendon fucking Urie.”_

_“I just want to feel like I belong to you,” Brendon says. He feels so helpless, a feeling that is becoming more and more familiar but no more comfortable with Ryan, with the boy he loves, with the only person he has ever loved, except for, or maybe including, himself._

_“No, you don’t,” says Ryan. “You want to belong to the whole world, and feel like you’re at the center of it. You want to live in a spotlight I can’t stand, and when I say so, all you hear is that I don’t want to stand beside you.”_

_Brendon blinks. He’s too upset to hear this, really. He feels too threatened to take in any information that’s inconsistent with how he views himself, their relationship, this situation. “All I know is, if you wanted to stand beside me? If you really wanted to. You’d be there.”_

_“Fine,” says Ryan. “You write the song. You can write all the fucking songs.”_

_And Ryan walks out._

_And Brendon doesn’t go after him._

_Why would he? They’ve done all of this together, every step of the way. It’s the only way of being in a band, of being in love, he’s ever known. Ryan will come back, he knows he will. They belong together. They’ll find a way to work it out._

_And Ryan does. It’s just that it doesn’t include Brendon._

*

Pete is humming something Brendon vaguely, can’t-quite-place-it, almost recognizes all day. They’re a little drunk, very unshowered, and eating hibachi with chopsticks in Brendon’s pool (“What is the point of takeout hibachi? I want a shrimp flipped into a chef’s pocket. I want an onion volcano. I want to catch steak in my mouth,” Pete complains. “You’re dropping so much rice it’s gonna clog the pool filter,” Brendon complains back.) when he catches himself singing along under his breath.

“Ever since we met, I only shoot up with your perfume,” he murmurs. Then, hearing himself, he spins to face Pete, spraying fried rice everywhere. “You!” he yelps, poking Pete hard in the naked chest with his chopstick. “How do you know that song? That song doesn’t exist!”

“It does exist. It’s on your hard drive. Bren, it’s _good_. You have to use it.”

Takeout carton and all, Brendon plunges under the water, just to escape. But even down here, he can still hear the unfinished words to an unfinished demo in his head:

_Ever since we met, I only shoot up with your perfume. It’s the only thing that makes me feel as good as you do. Ever since we met, I’ve just got one regret to live through, and that one regret is you. How does a heart love if no one has noticed its presence? And where does it go? Trembling hands play my heart like a drum, but the beat’s gotten lost in the show. You have set your heart on haunting me forever from the start._

It’s the last thing he and Ryan ever wrote together, though he didn’t know that when they were writing it. You play my heart like a drum, but the beat’s gotten lost in the show: offstage and small, Brendon’s listening now. Fuck, but Brendon hears him now.

He decides to stay underwater forever. With just this song in his ears, he decides to hurry up and drown.

*

Pete at rock bottom, _all the way at rock bottom_ , looks like this: kissing Brendon first. Kissing Brendon back. Pulling Brendon down on top of him. Tugging down Brendon’s basketball shorts, hard through his sweats.

Brendon looks down at him from above, gasping want and impossible amber eyes, the kind you expect to find dino DNA inside of. Brendon looks down at him from above and finally sees it, for the first time.

This is Pete at his worst.

Brendon is Pete at his worst.

*

How they get to this moment is:

Brendon comes to Pete’s to rescue him. And not like princes rescue princesses, because they don’t know a better way to get some ass; not because he wants to kiss a corpse; not because he thinks the drugged-out, bespelled body of a doesn’t-know-better is his right or his reward.

He comes because he hasn’t seen or heard from Pete in five days, and at first he thought it was Bronx, but then he ran into Ashlee at fucking Shake Shack and there was Pete’s son, tiny and blond, a squirmy smiling toddler.

“Where’s Pete?” Brendon asked. Bronx reached for him with spit-wet fingers, fisted up Brendon’s hoodie and squeezed. He pet the baby’s head, his tiny back, looked for Pete in his face but couldn’t find him—not in this easy, happy child. Brendon is sure that Pete as a baby was a thunderstorm, a squall, with cracks of lightning so big and so bright you’d think the sun was coming out, just for a moment.

“It’s not my job to know where Pete is,” Ashlee reminded Brendon. “He cancelled his weekend with B, though, and that’s not like him.”

Pete is supposed to call Brendon for things like this.

And if he doesn’t? Brendon will break down his fucking door.

*

Brendon doesn’t need to: the door to Pete’s little one-story bungalow up in Beverly Hills is unlocked. He lets himself in and heads for the ladder to the loft, where he finds Pete in a pile of bedding and laundry, a tangle of washed and unwashed linen and boy.

There are bottles at Pete’s bedside, spring water in green glass, pills in orange plastic, clear liquor in gas station polyethylene. Most of them are empty. It makes Brendon angry, the slump of Pete and the too-hot, sweat-smelling air up here, the casual danger posed by those bottles, the damage he knows Pete has accidentally done with bottles before. At least when they’re playing at drowning in Brendon’s pool, they are being honest about their intentions. He hates to think how easy it would be for Pete to slip away like this without even meaning to. He hates to think how often he finds his friends facedown in the leftover wreckage of dishonest destruction, Spencer who’s _just partying_ and Pete who’s _just taking his meds_.

He yanks covers off Pete roughly, puts his ear close to Pete’s mouth to check for breathing. Pete’s arms come up around his neck and he pulls Brendon down. Brendon falls to the low messy bed and Pete, his eyes barely slitted open, nudges Brendon’s chin with his nose, drags his lips from the knob of Brendon’s throat up to Brendon’s lips. Brendon feels shaky-sour and grateful. There is nothing that proves you’re alive, to yourself and everyone else, quite like fucking. He doesn’t question it. He kisses Pete back.

He kisses Pete back, sinks into Pete’s body, the soft-and-hard of him. He lets his eyes close and flutter and roll with the pleasure of Pete’s desperate teeth on his neck, Pete’s tongue licking open his mouth, Pete sucking and pulling at Brendon’s eager-to-swell lips. He lets Pete’s hands wander, tugging shorts down and out of the way, digging fingerpads into Brendon’s hip on the way down, down, to find Brendon’s dick.

Brendon gasps, actually gasps, because no one’s touched him but him in so long, and his own touch is toxic, an angrybitterscorch that makes the skin peel back like chemical burns. Pete _needs_ him, and he can feel it in Pete’s palms, bleeding through the membranes that keep them separate even when they’re sinking into one. They’re not divers, Brendon thinks, or drowned men: they are kings beneath the sea, ones always burned by the breath of air finally discovering the sweet opioid blue of water-in-lungs.

Pete is so loose and open beneath him, limbs heavy-numb and not just willing but rendered docile by want, and Brendon knows he can do anything to Pete and Pete won’t stop him, Pete will want it. Brendon has done nothing to take power here, done nothing to initiate or further this interaction, yet he sees by the heavy-lidded bliss and absence on Pete’s face that he’s deep in subspace. Experimentally, Brendon pushes his fingers through Pete’s stubbled short hair, snagging on the beginnings of his natural curls, tugging his head back enough to tilt their kiss deeper, opening Pete. The moan that uncurls from inside Pete’s ribcage, the frantic gratitude of his lapping tongue, the way the whole length of his body shivers beneath Brendon—it tells him he’s on the right track. He cups his hand over Pete’s throat and pulls back from the kiss; Pete presses up into his grip, choking himself lightly in pursuit of Brendon’s lips. Pete’s hips and hand speed up on Brendon’s cock, desperate for shipwreck, and Brendon laughs into their kiss, low and delicious. He could do this forever. Why did they wait so long?

All Brendon wants is to pour himself out into Pete, to lose himself and shed the skin of his whole history, to drown here til he’s deep enough it feels no different than floating upwards. All Brendon wants is to give Pete what he needs, to break them both open because it hurts better than healing—

Pete wriggles under him distractingly, his body too solid and strong, the wrong length, the wrong size, and makes that sound again. The scraped-out one, the helpless raw cry, the one Brendon has only ever heard him make once before, on a tour bus in 2008 with someone else inside him.  Someone he loved. Someone who, with your eyes closed, with enough empty bedside bottles, sounds almost-but-isn’t like Brendon.

Suddenly Brendon doesn’t want to fuck anymore. He wants—he wants—the things that he wants crumble to ash in his hand. They aren’t relevant, anymore, to the man he is or the life he’s got. He needs to pare all that dead weight away or he’ll never be light enough to float. If he’s going to survive, he needs to learn to say goodbye, to stop clinging to his ghosts. 

Brendon takes Pete’s hand off him, so soft where once it was calloused from bass strings. “You don’t want to do this,” he says, nuzzled up against Pete’s ear. He’s still ragged and trembly with want, but he understands clearer now what the want is really about. It’s not Pete. Not like this. This isn’t the kind of friend he wants to be anymore. “You deserve so much better.”

Pete blinks up at him, so far away Brendon can’t tell if there’s a person left inside. “Do what you want to me,” he slurs. “It doesn’t matter.”

“What I want to do is take care of you better than this.” Brendon says it firmly, because with Pete soft and open below him like this, with the red friction of their mutually throbbing cocks, with the copper taste of his own loneliness thick in his mouth, he needs the reminder.

Brendon directs Pete to the shower and sets himself to making coffee, scrounging Pete’s cabinets for something they can eat. He finds a few stale boxes of kid’s cereal, a tray of freezer burnt pizza bagels, a jar of peanut butter, and some fruit roll-ups. It’s probably more than he has in his own cabinets, honestly. He’s preheating the oven when he hears the sound of something breaking. Brendon runs for the bathroom, praying it’s not Pete.

Pete has fallen, shattering the shower door on his way down. He’s crying over the drain, water running down the tattoo on the back of his neck, surrounded by a sharp-edged sea of chunks of glass. At first Brendon is paralyzed, has no idea how to get to Pete. Then he remembers about shoes, gets his and a pair for Pete, and wades into the arctic ice floe of frosty glass Pete is stranded in.

“He asked the internet to choose,” Pete’s saying when Brendon gets to him. “Like it didn’t make any difference to him, like he couldn’t tell and didn’t care.”

Brendon shuts the water off, drapes a towel over Pete, gets his sandals on him. It’s hard to believe that 10 minutes ago they were about to fuck. Pete seems so small and vulnerable now, Brendon would be horrified at himself if anything he did could surprise him anymore.

“It’s a song. Two songs or one song. Don’t tell me it doesn’t mean anything, because I’m the one who taught him about meaning—I’m the one who taught him how words are, what they can do, why you have to be serious about them. We had—so many fights.” Pete’s laugh is horrible as Brendon’s heart. “We aren’t gonna have fights like that anymore. Ever again. Did you see the songs, Bren? Did you see what they were _called_.”

They make it through the field of glass. Brendon just closes the bathroom door: neither of them have the resources to deal with that particular shattering right now. Pete’s not hurt—not hurt by glass, that is—and that’s the main thing.

“How much more sense would you be making right now if I googled _Patrick Stump_?” Brendon asks, when he has Pete towel-wrapped and situated at the kitchen table, water still beading down his face.

“Is it Oh Nostalgia,” says Pete, “or New Regrets. The question is whether he’s glad he left me, left the band. Whether he misses me. Whether it was a mistake. He can’t even _decide_ , he wants the internet to _vote on it_.”

Brendon pulls out his google machine, finds Patrick’s blog post quickly, hits play on the mp3 of one version of the new solo single. It doesn’t take long to understand what the problem is. For one, Patrick sounds amazing, more like himself that he did on any Fall Out Boy record. And—it’s not a goodbye song or a sad song or anything you might hope to hear from an ex. It’s a hopeful song, a moving on song, sincere and peppy and bright. “Oh nostalgia, I don’t need you anymore,” Patrick sings out of Brendon’s phone speaker. “You can be your own spotlight!”

Even Brendon can hear it, how it sounds like he’s saying he doesn’t need Pete anymore. The boy who stood in the spotlight for him, the boy who became the heel, the punching bag, the spectacle, the diversion—Patrick is ready, now, to occupy that space alone. And sound fantastic doing it. He’s become his own spotlight.

It’s a song of not looking back, because you don’t need to. Patrick’s releasing a song like this, and Pete’s stuck lovedrunk and dizzy with novocaine in the rearview.

They need to stop reliving their regrets, Brendon thinks. If they’re ever going to endure this. They need to face forward, go in order, make new lives.

*

_“Why didn’t he tell me himself?” It is not the first or fourth or fifteenth time he’s asked it._

_Spencer still doesn’t have an answer. He just keeps shaking his head, his arm slung miserable over Brendon’s shaking shoulders, saying, “I’m sorry, Bren.”_

_“What are you sorry for?” Brendon snarls, because he can’t accept another apology from this man, this friend, this person whose band he’s blown up too. There were more fights than just him and Ryan, than kissing-or-not onstage-or-not: there was the direction of the record, who wrote what and whose contributions were included and who was the one who decided, and what to do about Spencer. These fights were all just as bitter, just as unresolvable. Any one of them might have ended the band._

_But they didn’t._

_Brendon did._

_Without evening knowing it, Brendon did._

_Spencer shrugs miserably. He doesn’t know what to say anymore than Brendon does, he only knows that Brendon lost his band_ and _his first love all at once. He knows because Spencer was the one to deliver the message. Because Ryan didn’t even say it to Brendon’s face. He made Spencer say it:_ If you love me, let me go.

_Now Spencer says,  I’m sorry that after everything, this is how it ends.”_

_And that’s when Brendon realizes what Spencer thinks is happening. He thinks that without Ryan, Brendon’s world ends. He thinks that without Ryan and Jon, there’s not a band anymore._

_Brendon will be the whole fucking band himself, is that’s what it takes. He catches Spencer’s gaze and this time, instead of drowning pools, his eyes are firebrands, white-hot glitter. “Nothing is ending,” he vows. “From now on, every record we make will be better than the last. From now on, everything is fucking cherries on top.”_

_Spencer doesn’t quite look like he believes him, but that’s okay. Brendon will show him, and Ryan too. Brendon will show the world. He’s not done yet. He’s barely started. Because there’s simply nothing worse than knowing how it ends._

_No one wants you when you have no heart, but you’ll never know if you don’t ever try again._

*

“I wouldn’t have stopped you,” Pete tells him, the same night or the next day or a week later. It doesn’t matter when it happens: ten years from now Brendon will know exactly what he’s talking about.

“That’s why I did,” Brendon says. “I want to be better than everyone thinks I am.”

Pete shakes his head, everything about him evoking sheets and sheets of shattered, shattering, and yet-to-shatter glass. A living pile of rubble, he says, “I want to be _exactly_ what they all say I am. And then I want to be worse.”

*

A few weeks later, Pete and Brendon and Spencer sit in Brendon’s studio and listen to the track that has become _Nearly Witches_. It feels like more than salvage: it feels like something new. As a goodbye, it is wholly inadequate. But as a song, Brendon thinks it’s pretty good.

“You think we’re ready?” Spencer asks Brendon. All three of them are sober. Brendon’s heart is fuller than it was before, sitting next to a Spencer with clear eyes, steady voice, sure hands. They have the bones of a whole bunch of songs, now; with devoted studio time, they’ll have a record. Being with Pete, paradoxically, has helped Brendon learn to write alone.

“I know we think we’re ready,” Brendon says. He and the one remaining member of his band share a smile.

“Fuckin’ self-referential dorks,” Pete mutters, recognizing the snippet of lyrics and directing his smile towards the floor.

It’s not the album Brendon thought he’d make, not the people he thought he’d made it with. But he’s not floating facedown in the pool anymore. One song at a time, he’s writing himself back to life.

*

 _Vices & Virtues_, they call it. The good thing Brendon made, with the help of his friends, from the smoldering ruin of his personal life: thirty-seven minutes of hope, or proof, or pouring on gasoline. By the time the record drops, Brendon is engaged to Sarah, a girl too good to be true. Pete has been to Jamaica and back, immersing himself in the music of his heritage, and is writing a very different type of song than he ever has before, with a very different vocalist singing his pared-down, simple-as-aching words. They still go out together, still get too drunk and stay out til they’re living upside down to sunrise. They’re better than everyone says they are. They’re worse too.

Pete is not okay and no one, seeing him, would say he is, but he’s not pulling Brendon into bed with him either, so that’s something. He goes on a few dates with a model who seems to level him out, to remind him there are reasons to shower and put pants on at least some days of the week. He watches over Brendon’s shoulder while Brendon flushes the contents of his prescription bottles down the toilet, one by one by one.

Patrick’s record comes out and it is spectacular, of course it is. Brendon and Pete go to see him perform in Inglewood together. Brendon’s pretty sure Pete wants to slip in and out like a vapor, undetected, but it’s a small smoky club, sweaty with tense energy that makes everyone conspicuous, even the bodies without famous faces attached. Patrick looks spooked up there, with his new hair and his new clothes and his new body. The new bravado hasn’t quite grown in yet. He looks like he’s learned to front a band without a Pete, but he doesn’t exactly seem comfortable with it. Brendon drags Pete up to the front of the crowd, because no matter what happened between them, Patrick deserves to see a friendly face and Pete could benefit from thinking of himself as a friend. They are rewarded with a huge smile when Patrick spots them, and Pete’s fingernails cutting into Brendon’s arm when Patrick’s touring guitarist presses up against him and Patrick presses back like old, familiar habit.

Ryan and Jon form their own band, release an album, dissolve again just as quickly. Brendon does not go to any of their shows and Pete does not ask him to. They don’t kiss anymore, don’t play at drowning; but they do fall asleep on the same couch sometimes, curled together like a matched set of princes who won’t become kings, the inheritors of only their own wreckage and nothing greater, brighter, hotter than the arson fires they’ve lit. Brendon builds a house on his memories, filming a video decked out in eyeliner and a top hat and extra-performative scorn, while Pete sets fire to his. They still go up on Brendon’s roof and chuck things into the pool below, delighting in the suspended stretch between flying and falling, soaring and sinking. They still lean out a little too far over the edge, greedy for the splash.

The peril of climbing upwards is that you can fall back down again at any moment. Brendon keeps tight hold of Pete, his friend, his anchor. They still have time to save each other from themselves, he thinks. Time to fall, and die, and rise again. They’ll find their way out of this bottomless pit; one day they’ll float on the surface of the this sea, faces turned to the sun instead what’s sunken.

But there’s no need to hurry. They’ll get there in time.

 

_My one regret is ever letting you go._


End file.
